With ‘1 World 100 Lonely’ filmmaker and Raindance alumnus Brian McGuire presents a deeply intimate portrait of human relationships and love through the stories of four people as they’re drawn together and pulled apart. In the first storyline, a man from the US and an Iranian woman living in the UK finally meet after an online relationship. In the second, a man discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him, leading him to spiral into depression while she leads her own journey of self-discovery. Loneliness and desperation for meaningful human contact are big themes in this film, but so is the sweet, joyful optimism of the beginning of something new and, just maybe, beautiful. Brian McGuire tells his stories with a distinctive lo-fi, handheld style in which the shaky camera sticks close to the characters and the action is presented in a naturalistic way, making the fictional stories feel like documentary footage. These scenes are intercut with sequences of pictures of the characters and text messages they exchange. The result is a film that feels extremely intimate and truthful in its portrayal of the emotional experiences people undergo in the struggle to find that elusive thing called ‘love’.